


why didn't you stop me?

by swingingparty



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, M/M, The Homestuck Epilogues, The Homestuck Epilogues: Candy, the girls are fightingggg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:35:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25706749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swingingparty/pseuds/swingingparty
Summary: He’s standing in the middle of the living room when you unlock the front door and manage to kick it open, almost staggering inside with the force of your movements. The thing sticks in the summer, it’s stuck every year since you moved into this place and a small, weird part of you hopes it never gets fixed. Because as infinitesimal as the change is, it’s change all the same, and given the fact that none other than Karkat fucking Vantas is standing in the middle of the room, deer in the headlights, a duffel bag packed to bursting at his side, you have a feeling you’re about to max out your yearly quota for change in the next twenty minutes flat.
Relationships: Dave Strider/Karkat Vantas
Comments: 11
Kudos: 76





	why didn't you stop me?

**Author's Note:**

> hi <3 sry i havent posted anything in 28399382 years writing block go brrr

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

He’s standing in the middle of the living room when you unlock the front door and manage to kick it open, almost staggering inside with the force of your movements. The thing sticks in the summer, it’s stuck every year since you moved into this place and a small, weird part of you hopes it never gets fixed. Because as infinitesimal as the change is, it’s change all the same, and given the fact that none other than Karkat fucking Vantas is standing in the middle of the room, deer in the headlights, a duffel bag packed to bursting at his side, you have a feeling you’re about to max out your yearly quota for change in the next twenty minutes flat.

You hadn’t really meant to kick things off on that note, but the damage is done, you figure, and kick the door shut behind you. The bang echoes around the apartment. Karkat stays where he is, stationary and frozen, hunched over himself just a little.

He looks surprised to see you, even more surprised to hear you speak, somehow, like this isn’t your house, like this isn’t your life, like this isn’t your living room he’s just miraculously showed up in at ten o’clock at night, dressed in his stupid turtleneck and ratty jeans and looking for all the world like he’s some two-bit crank trying to rob you, not the dude you’ve known with, lived with—hell, fucking _grown up with_ since you were thirteen years old.

For a second, neither of you speak. You’ve said your part—you think you’ve said all you’re going to be able to say for the next seven billion years to him, really—and now it’s his turn. His line to rattle off, his pocket of silence to fill, his answer to force out into coherency. It’s his turn. 

It’s been his turn for a while, you think, you want to say, but maybe that’s not fair. Maybe it’s been yours, too, and you've been too busy ducking your head, staring at your feet, kicking the dirt around to notice that the whole line has shifted up without you.

There’s a metaphor there somewhere, you think, somewhere close to the surface, but it hardly matters now because he's jamming his free hand—the one not white-knuckling the strap of his duffel bag—deep into his pocket, the outline of his knuckles standing out sharp against the dull fabric of his jeans, and opening his mouth. You catch sight of the dual rows of still-oddly blunt teeth and there’s just enough time for your chest to wrench painfully before he starts speaking.

“I didn’t think you would be here.”

His voice is the same—of course it is, you think, almost smiling, it’s only been just over a week; it’s not like the biological fundamentals of his character are going to suddenly change up on you in eight days flat, even if it feels like they must have for all the time he’s been gone—rough and scratchy, rocks against sandpaper, reverberating right out from the pit of his chest into yours. He always speaks with his whole body, keeps his chin held high, fills up every atom of space allotted to him in a room, and tonight is no different, even as he stands in the center of your living room— _your_ living room now, removing any possessive connotations on his part, because isn’t that what you have to do when someone fucks off like he did?—shifting from foot to foot, eyes on everything but you like the two of you have never met and he’s sort of secretly glad things turned out that way.

You could make a joke, crack the ice with the well-worn hammer of shitty comedy like you’ve done in the past, but there’s something cold and sharp filling the spaces between your lungs that makes it hard to think of anything funny. You become acutely aware of the fact that you’re still holding your keys—a little too hard, probably—and you set them down on the coffee table beside you with a faint _clink._ He traces the motion of your hands with your eyes like it’s something disembodied, not attached to anyone of any significance, and for some reason this only makes the cold feeling in your chest worsen. 

“Wow,” you say, and as much as you will your voice to come out flat and calm, summoning up some foreign drawl you remember possessing a literal couple thousand years ago, your words still sound sharp, bitter to your own ears. Like some sort of jilted ex-wife, standing on the porch with a shotgun in one hand, rolling pin in the other, screaming until the cops come to drag her away. You suppose that isn’t that far off, the metaphor—you’re relatively certain Jade has a rolling pin stashed away somewhere in the kitchen that you can dig up if needs be—except for the fact that in this situation, Karkat’s the intruder, not you.

Though it still feels indescribable levels of weird to call him an intruder. Not when the pillows in your room still smell like him and he’s still in the photos hanging up in the entry hall and you keep finding his socks in the laundry. Not when there is such tangible proof that he was once here, too, that this space that you had carved out in the new universe had been a home for him, too. 

But still. The metaphor mandates, and Karkat’s silence is relentless, so you hold the image of him as an intruder in your head a little firmer—all he’s missing is a ratty-looking ski mask, you think, and want so badly to be able to find that funny—and try to keep your voice even as you keep speaking.

“Wow,” you say again. He blinks once, gaze locked somewhere near the vicinity of your right knee. “Isn’t it so cool how you totally just did not answer the question there?”

You wonder, almost idly, if this was the sort of thing you were in any way able to think about in an idle manner, if he’s even paying attention. Maybe your knee is just that absorbing. Maybe there’s a stain on your pants. Maybe he never gave even half a shit about you in the first place. 

“Like, there wasn’t even any acknowledgement.” You resist the urge to pick up your keys again, to grip them in your fist, to do something, _anything_ with yourself that isn’t stand here and look at Karkat Vantas refusing to look at you. “You just breezed straight through that motherfucker. God damn.” 

Karkat reaches up to rub at the bridge of his nose, scrunching his face up. You can see bags under his eyes, the almost gaunt look to his face made all the more prominent by dim lighting of the living room. Or maybe he looks fine, healthy, better rested than you’ve seen him in months, and you’re just looking for things to hold onto. You’re just looking for parts of you in him, any indication—however, vague, however insubstantial, however over-dramatized by low-level lighting and nighttime gloom—that him leaving has fucking sucked as much for him as it has for you.

“I thought you weren’t coming back,” he finally says, voice snapping through the silence like a broken rubber band. He blinks, gaze shuttering like flashlights flicking off for a second. You watch as he turns his gaze down to the duffel bag still at his feet, brows creasing in an expression that almost looks like confusion. _The fuck am I doing here?_ you can almost hear him asking himself. _The fuck am I wasting my time here for?_

Maybe there’s some extrapolation there, but still. You’ve never been off the money with these things, not nearly as much as you want to sometimes. 

“This is my apartment,” you remind him, and if your voice stumbles over the _my_ a little, grasps for something better—easier, really, easier on you—to substitute it with, Karkat doesn’t so much as blink funny in response; his gaze is back to your knee, and you resist the ridiculous urge to look down too just to make sure there isn’t actually a stain there, or something. Instead you blink, breathe around the ever sharpening-cold in your chest, and make the impulse decision to strike first.

You don’t want to fight, not really, but he’s here and you’re here and this whole shitty tapestry of domestic bliss fucked sideways is occupying numbers one through five billion on your list of things you’d rather cut your own arms off than deal with. 

He’s here, and you’re here, and you sometimes wonder if there’s a reason you were always so good at pissing each other off. 

“Our apartment.” You swallow back a mouthful of sandpaper, a mouthful of his voice, hard and sharp and stabbing you right where it hurts even while he bites his tongue for the first time in memorable history. “If you wanna get technical about it.”

Karkat blinks, squeezing his eyes shut for a second. His face looks caught between abject neutrality and vague discomfort, a frown and a grimace. The angle of his head, tipped down to the ground, makes his hair fall into his eyes like he’s thirteen again, and it takes a conscious effort on your part to keep yourself grounded here, in the quiet darkness of the apartment and not the endless dusty corridors and untouched libraries and beat-up red plush couches of the meteor. 

“I really don’t,” Karkat says, and, yep, that’s now an undisputed grimace passing across his face. 

His head jerks up, and for a second you think he’s going to look at you, but his gaze just keep on moving; it roves over your shoulder, fixates on picture frames and light switches, scratches in the walls and the laundry you still haven’t folded thrown out all over the couch. He watches the pieces of your life—yours in the plural sense, yours in the sense of something that, up until eight days, three hours, fifty-six minutes, and seventeen seconds ago, the two of you had in common, the two of you shared—coalesce behind you like some sort of ill-constructed impressionist painting. If he notices the tear and holes his own departure left—because being real, his leaving wasn’t so much as bumping against the canvas in a brief moment of clumsiness as it was putting his fist straight through the fabric in one, clean motion—he doesn’t say anything, just keep his gaze jumping from object to object, passing over the space you occupy like you’re not even there. 

“Course you don’t,” you say, and now your voice comes light, breezy, the note of calm so obviously forced it’s nothing short of a literal miracle Karkat manages to keep a blank face throughout it. “Wouldn’t have fucked off like you did if that was the case.”

He blinks once, long and slow. Like he’s waking up.

“Right?”

You watch a muscle in his jaw flex. You watch the outlines of his knuckles in his jean pockets. You watch the way he takes a breath, eyes shutting in time with the rise of his shoulders. He’s nothing if not predictable sometimes; you know this is his half-assed attempt at getting himself back under control, of not rising to the bait you’re so obviously dangling in front of him. “Dave.” 

This is his code. This is his saying _I don’t want to fight right now._ This is his saying _please._

There’s a part of you that wants to listen. It’s not even as small as you’d like it to be. 

“Why’d you think I wouldn't be home?”

Not small, yeah, but not big enough for you to keep your mouth shut, either. You’re not sure if this pisses you off or not. You’re even less sure if you want to figure out the answer to that. Because on one hand, this is your best friend here. All residual bullshit aside, this is your best fucking friend standing here in front of you, and tearing into him never feels as good as you want it to. It’s not ingrained in you to hate him, not anymore—and if you’re being honest with yourself, you’re not sure if it ever really was even when the two of you first met—and pushing him closer and closer towards the point of legitimate anger, egging him on until the situation explodes into the fight you always find yourself half hoping for, half dreading feels as weird and unnatural and painful as pulling your teeth out with pliers. 

But on the other. 

You look down at your literal hands for a second, as if that could actually offer up some sort of concrete answer to that question, to any of the billions of questions that are starting to pile up dangerously high in the back of your throat at the sight of Karkat standing in your living room. 

Helpfully enough, you draw up another blank— several of them, actually, and maybe it’s for the better, honestly. You and careful deliberation have never been tight at the best of times, and it doesn’t take a genius to tell that this exchange is going to go south and then some regardless of how polite you are to him. 

So you might as well just say what you want. Not like you have anything to lose, at least. 

“I—” He cuts himself off, blinking “Is that—” Falters again, staring deep into the empty space around you for a second longer before slowly—painfully slowly, you can’t help but think, even though you feel like this is the exact sort of thing you need to stop giving a shit about as soon as possible—wrenching his gaze over to meet yours. 

His eyes are bright, wide, a pair of flashlights in the gloom. You get the feeling he’s looking right through you, and your skin crawls a little. 

“How is that relevant right now?”

His tone is dripping with something cold and sharp all of a sudden, worlds different from the bemused tiredness from earlier. A sneer half-creeps into his words, lighting them up from the inside out, and something hardens in the pit of your stomach.

On one hand, yeah, you shouldn’t rise to this, because deep down you know it’s not going to be worth it, but honestly, fuck that hand. Fuck both the hands, fuck whatever hypothetical bullshit you were tying to make them stand for to justify the next dumbass thing you let fall from your lips, and fuck Karkat Vantas. Fuck him especially. “You wanna get on my ass about relevance right now?”

“I—”

You steamroll on, cutting him off before the rest of his sentence even starts to build up in the back of his throat. “‘Cause personally _I_ think relevance would probably sound more like me cutting the bullshit and saying, like, oh, hey dude, so glad you just broke into my fucking apartment in the middle of the night to go grab some of your shit you allegedly left the last time you were here—speaking of that, you wanna sit down and talk about how you literally broke up with Jade and fucked off to go live with Kanaya and won’t get your head out of your ass for five seconds so you can act like a normal fucking person about this for once and—”

“Okay.” His expression is pinching up around the edges, lips pressing together, muscle in his jaw starting to work. “I think I get it.”

You know there’s a point you can always stop at. To Karkat’s credit, he’s being lenient tonight; on worse days, he would be at your throat by now—metaphorically and literally, probably—spitting a barrage of insults into your open mouth. On worse nights, _he_ would’ve been the one to cut the bullshit instead of letting the two of you stand there staring at your feet, stalling in a way neither of you ever really gave much of a shit about doing back before all this. On worse nights, he might already be out the door, and you know the fact that he isn't is an opening in itself. An opening to stop, really. To back down before it gets worse.

And It sucks, then—really, it does—that stopping was never something you learned how to do. 

“Do you? Do you really?” There’s something building up under your words, That’s fucking awesome, dude. I’m so happy your emotional intelligence has reached the level of a fucking brain-dead second grader. My hat is on the fucking floor right now.”

Karkat’s lips press together like he’s actively biting down a comment. After a second of silence, you hear him huff a small sigh. “Why are you doing this?

He’s speaking softly, all things about him considered, and it only makes your response sound louder, angrier, a whip-crack in the dark. “What?” You pull closer to him again, squaring your shoulders without even thinking about it. “Doing what?”

His sigh is a little louder this time, a little less tired and a little more frustrated. You’re wearing him down, and in the heat of the moment you almost don’t think to feel guilty about the flash of vindication this gives you. “Turning it into a fight. I don’t want to fight.” He makes a vague, sweeping gesture at the bag still by his feet. “I just want to grab my fucking laundry, Dave.”

Because it always boils down to the boring little details with him. It’s always about the laundry or about who sleeps where on the bed, or about the exact bullshit troll word to segment up your relationship. It’s never about the shit that actually matters, and you know this is by intention.

You know he knows this, too.

“Don’t you? Isn’t this the shit you like doing?” You take a step closer towards him. “Isn’t this how we work best? Pissing each other the fuck off?”

“Do you really think that?”

There’s a break in his voice, a crack in filter that throws a glimpse of real, genuine hurt into relief. For a second you feel a sharp flash of vindication before guilt crawls up the back of your throat. Then you just feel stupid for caring in the first place, because even though he’s looking at you 

“Well, we tried the other shit, but in case you missed it, it didn’t actually go too well.” You hear yourself scoff. “By the way, nice fucking excuse, dude.” 

Karkat’s expression shutters into one of incredulity. “What?”

“We cleaned out your laundry the day after you carted your ass outta here and I know you know that ‘cause I told Kanaya to fucking tell you so you didn’t show up and try to pull shit like this. So you wanna tell me what the fuck you’re actually doing here, or no? ‘Cause I gotta say, dude, you skulking around my living room at fuck-all o’clock at night is more than a little suspicious to me.” 

The incredulity on his face bypasses any other linear chain of progression and morphs right into a funny sort of pissed-off hilarity, like he can’t decide whether he wants to laugh at you or deck you. “What, you think I’m going to steal shit from you, or something? Are you serious?

“I’m just—”

“Also, _your_ apartment? Pretty different tune from the bullshit you were just spewing about this dump being _ours_ a few seconds ago.”

“Yeah, fuck you, it’s my apartment.” You grit your teeth. Sometimes he’s so transparent it kills you, but maybe that’s just the force of habit talking there. “You know, as far as deflections go, not your finest, dude. Word of advice: you’re really not that good at pretending you give a flying fuck about stuff when you so obviously do not. Might wanna switch up your tactic next time you pull shit like this on someone else.” 

Karkat’s glare deepens. “Oh, because you’re really the one to preach the fucking gospel about _deflection_ , Dave.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

You don’t really want the answer to that, but apparently Karkat doesn’t really want to give it, either, because he just folds his arms across his chest for a second, uncrosses them, balls his hands into fists at his sides, and then screws his eyes up at you.

“Don’t play dumb,” he snaps. “You know exactly what it’s supposed to mean.”

“This might be a sort of fucking novel concept for you, but some people actually ask questions ‘cause they don’t know the answer. Not everyone talks just so they can hear themselves word vomit all over the place, you know.”

“No.” And he rocks back on his heels, a self-satisfied smirk flashing across his face like you’ve walked right into a trap you didn’t even know was there. “You just ask questions so other people can say the answers for you. Because you’re too scared to say them yourself. Right?”

You falter, impressively so, mouth hanging open without even the faintest hope of an appropriate response to that falling from your lips. It’s not even that good of a point, goddamnit, but there’s something about the way Karkat says it—with his whole chest, like he means it and nothing else—that knocks the floor out from underneath you. 

Suddenly, a change of topic seems like a really, really good idea. “Why the fuck are you here?”

He doesn’t miss a beat. “To get my fucking laundry.”

Neither do you. Sometimes it feels like you’ve done this a thousand times before. “Bullshit. Stop lying.”

Karkat cracks a smile that’s all teeth and falls so short of his eyes it might as well be dropping through the floor. He closes the distance you had just put between him, footsteps impossibly loud as he draws up in front of you. “Oh, you want to talk about _lying_ , now? That’s really the route you want to go down with me?”

There’s a new note in his voice, something cold and sharp, completely and totally unlike anything you’ve ever heard from the troll before—anything you've ever heard directed at you, at the very least—and there a pretty loud voice in the back of your head telling you that you are about to enter something uncharted.

There is a pretty loud voice in the back of your head telling you that, after this point, backing down will not be an option. There is a pretty large part of you that knows this might be the final fucking straw: for him as well as for you.

And yet you still keep talking all the same. “I want you to—”

But Karkat, apparently, is done with listening. “Stop the fucking presses, everyone! Dave motherfucking Strider wants to sit down and have a talk with me—fucking _me—_ about _lying.”_ He spreads his hands out in a half-bow, a mocking gesture, a taunt. A dare, maybe. “Please, the floor is yours! Expound all the wisdom your cracked-up, emotionally-stunted thinkpan can produce for me. Go on, tell me what you know about not being a liar. I can imagine the list of shit is as long as my fucking arm.”

You falter again—there is something about the way he’s looking at you like you’re roadkill on the side of the street that makes it hard to focus on anything but the tightening feeling in the pit of your stomach—but collect yourself much better. Even offer up a sneer of your own to match the one plastered across his face, because you’re shitty and you suck and the more you think about it the more you realize that you’re not even sure you _want_ to leave room to salvage any of this.

It’s a fine line to walk, that territory of thinking, because if you give it too much consideration you realize that conclusion is wrong, too; there are literally no things you want to fix more than whatever the fuck has happened between the two of you. It just so happens to be the case that there are no things you know what to do about less than this, too.

So you keep talking. You keep talking because it’s easier and because it’s harder and because you swear it might be the only fucking thing you know how to do anymore nowadays.

“I haven’t got the faintest fucking clue what you’re talking about, and unless you plan on really doing me a solid and being direct—”

“Direct? You’re crawling up my ass about being direct now?

“—then feel free to leave. Careful though, the door sticks. If you haven’t forgotten about that already, that is.”

“Sorry, back the fuck up.” His tone shifts again, crossing into the territory of violently scathing in a way you’ve never heard before, too. The stray beams of light from the neighbors’ houses outside catch in his eyes, lighting them up headlamp yellow, search beams in the dark. You feel like he’s peeling back your skin to take a good look inside you just so he knows how to hit you where it really hurts, and you hate him so indescribably much for it. “First lying, and now _directness?”_

“What about it?”

“What about—are you actually fucking kidding me?” He swings his arms again, this time in your direction, and it’s just close enough to make you flinch back out of instinct. Karkat sees it—something indeterminate flashes across his face, and for a second you think he’s going to stop, but then the ball keeps rolling right along. “Do you even listen to a single thing you say or do you just open your mouth and let the first stream of sanctimonious bullshit your subconscious can cough up come out? Because I cannot conceivably see how it could be the first thing at this point. There’s literally no way you could in good fucking conscious lecture me about _honesty,_ even if you are so far up your own ass you can see between your fucking teeth.” He steps closer, closer than ever to being nose-to-nose with you. “That would just be ridiculous.”

You feel every atom of him further encroaching on your personal space, and it makes something wrench deep inside you. You call it anger, because that’s easier, that’s always easier, and leave it at that. “Funny how you’re getting on my case about this shit and then turning around and spouting vague-ass platitudes about God knows what like I’m supposed to have any clue what the fuck you’re going on about.”

He scoffs, short and sharp. “You don’t want me to be direct. You just want something to bitch about.”

“Oh, yeah?” And now you’re pulling closer too. “Fucking try me, Karkat. Lay this shit on me. Tell me what you really think about me.”

His face cracks into a serrated smile, broken glass on the concrete. He looks like he’s winning and knows it. “You’re a liar. You’re a fucking liar, Dave.”

And maybe he is. God fucking damnit.

But this time you don’t give him the satisfaction of knowing he’s hitting somewhere you think might be close to home. Even as your stomach pitches with something heavy and intangible you’re sneering right back at him, still in his face. “Damn. Really got me there. Ten outta fucking ten for that burn. You might wanna—”

“Shut the fuck up and for once in your life _listen_ to me, asswipe. You want directness? Want me to cut to the fucking chase? There, I said it: you’re a liar, Dave.” He punctuates the statement with a sharp jab to your chest. You feel the impact of his fingertips on a molecular level. “You’re a fucking liar and the funniest thing is you’re not even a _good_ one, because everyone and their lusus knows you’re pulling shit out of your ass.”

“What shit?”

“This shit, Dave! Fucking— _this!”_ Another sweeping gesture, another expression just short of a snarl. “Us! Every single fucking thing that has happened between us!”

Something heavy starts to build in the back of your throat for a second. It’s hard to speak around; you feel all of a sudden like your mouth is full of marbles you can barely mumble out sentences around. “You think that was a lie?”

Your voice comes out small, stupidly small, and the back of your neck burns.

In front of you, Karkat heaves another sigh. He looks six seconds away from doing that stupid thing he does: pacing in tight circles around the room, pinching the bridge of his nose, muttering obscenities into the palm of his hand like some world-weary college history professor, and for some reason, this pisses you off so much you almost can’t breathe for a second. “I gave you a choice—”

“You think I’ve been fucking lying to you for, what, six fucking years?”

He rolls his eyes at your tone—rising in both pitch and volume every second the conversation drags out. A part of you is embarrassed for getting so worked up purely out of muscle memory; the other part is too worked up in the first place to give a shit. 

“—you could be honest with me or I could leave. And you chose—” The column of his throat shifts as he swallows. “You fucking _chose—”_

“That wasn’t a fair thing to ask me and you fucking know it, dude—”

“And you think _this_ is? You think any of the shit you’ve been doing to me has been fair? You think sitting on my hands and biting my tongue while you went around mooning after fucking Jade like you hadn’t just been—”

The heavy weight in your stomach burns straight through into anger, icy heat burning up the back of your throat all of a sudden. 

“Don’t bring her up,” you say, voice rough. “You keep her name out of your fucking mouth.”

“Why?” Karkat’s lip peels back in the ghost of a sneer again. He’s striking a nerve and knows it, if only because you’re so goddam transparent about the whole thing. Letting your guard down had become a force of habit around him, and the more you try and stop, the more you realize just how ingrained in you that had been. Because that’s just what you fucking need, right? “Isn’t she important to all this?”

You think for a moment about her. She’s probably still with Rose and Kanaya, the dinner event you had so embarrassingly absconded from because the way Rose had been looking at you from across the table the whole night had made something tighten painfully in the back of your throat, and you know—you _know_ that she knows about it all, whatever the fuck _it_ is supposed to be anymore, and Rose _knowing_ things always invites the sort of questions that you’d rather set yourself fire than answer. It had been a nice dinner, though. It’s always nice to spend time with them.

 _With Jade,_ your brain offers up, but the sentence falls short somehow, ringing out hollowly in the back of your head. _It’s always nice to spend time with Jade._

And it is. It was when you were both kids fucking around on Pesterchum, you with the puppets in your fridge and the brother throwing knives at the wall for fun downstairs, her with the dead grandfather and island as a playground, and it will be when you’re both seven billion and twelve years old, or however long the two of you are supposed to live for. It will always be nice spending time with Jade because she is your best friend and she knows you and cares about you and loves you and you—

Just—

“She hasn’t done anything wrong,” you say aloud, and it feels like running away.

Karkat’s expression of vindication shifts back to one of unending frustration; he’s always been one for emotional displays bordering on outright fucking platitudes, but tonight he’s bypassed wearing his heart o his sleeve to just writing everything he’s feeling out across his face for all the world to see. A part of you wonders if this is intentional or involuntary and a smaller, colder part of you hopes it’s the latter; how good it would feel to know that, past the eye-rolling and bitter repartee, he is just as disarmed by you as you are by him?

“And I have? Please—fucking _please,_ Dave, tell me what I screwed up so bad you were willing to just stand by with your fucking shades and you fucking poker face and your fucking inability to give even half a shit about anyone who isn’t yourself and let me _leave.”_

His voice rises, cracking almost imperceptibly at the end. You watch his gaze swing around the room, looking for something to latch onto before finally settling back to your eyes. His look glassy when he speaks next, almost at a whisper all of a sudden.

“You let me leave.”

Yeah, it would feel really fucking good.

And aren’t you just the worst for thinking that?

“You wanted to fucking go, dude, what was I supposed to do?” You make an effort to keep your voice calm this time—a real, genuine effort, because it’s one thing to privately be the worst, and another thing to rub it in Karkat’s face. “Hang onto you by the fucking ankles and beg you to stay like some sort of five-year-old popping a blood vessel ‘cause his daddy’s gotta go to work for eight hours? Is that what you wanted?”

“I wanted you to be honest!” Karkat snaps, and there goes the calm.

You throw your hands up in the air, an exasperated hiss building up in the back of your throat. “Jesus fucking Christ, Karkat, about what?”

“About this!” He points at you, spreading his hands out, blaming, imploring, mocking—maybe all three. “About us, you fucking asshole!”

“I was!”

“No, you fucking weren’t. My god, do you think I’m stupid?” 

There’s something about the way he says it that makes you stop, just for a second. Blink and breathe and just _stop._

Because he says it with his whole chest, like he really, truly thinks you see him as the dumbest piece of shit this side of the universe, and suddenly you are fifteen standing in the doorway of his room after not having seen him for three days straight while he sits at the foot of his bed, arms wrapped around himself, expression scrubbed clean of anything that isn’t violent, bone-cutting self-hate. 

Suddenly you are fifteen and he is the only person—the only thing, really—you have it in you to give a shit about sometimes. 

But you aren’t fifteen. You’re both in your twenties and he’s still standing in your living room with the lights off because he couldn’t be bothered to face you for real, and everything that was once even semi-decent between the two of you is currently sitting in a dumpster somewhere on fire. You know this, and yet it’s still hard to switch back. 

Maybe because, as weird and awkward and downright shitty as things were back then, you can’t help but miss the meteor so much it’s like a physical ache in your chest, a hole punched straight through you. 

“You know I don’t—”

He cuts you off without blinking, and something twists in the pit of your stomach. “So what, then? You were just leading me on? Fucking with me just because you were bored?”

“That’s not how it was.”

“Then tell me how it was!” If you squint your eyes just right, it almost looks like Karkat is smiling. A derisive, cold, bitter smile, but a smile all the same. “What the fuck are we, Dave?” 

If you look from a different angle, though, he just looks tired. Tired and pissed. 

You’re distinctly aware that here is the moment—perhaps the most singular moment throughout this entire car crash of a conversation—that you have to choose your words very, very carefully. Any misspeaking, any misleading, any talking out of your ass here, and shit will only get worse, and though you’re sort of of the private opinion that shit cannot physically get any worse, you don’t want to test it. At all. 

And yet, despite that all, the first thing you hear yourself say as you open your mouth in response is: “we were friends.” And then again, because apparently you are just that much of a fucking idiot. “We were friends.”

“Were?”

The hurt in his voice is palpable from where you stand. It would probably be palpable even if he was standing on the other side of the universe. 

“You know what I meant—”

“Yeah,” and his voice is cold now, cold and flat, “you fucking meant _were.”_

It’s to the implication that annoys you, exactly, but the fact that you couldn’t tell him what you really meant if he held a gun to your head and instructed you to. Defining your relationship while it was still in vaguely good shape was always hard; doing so after the fact is half a step from completely fucking impossible.

You know there’s a right answer, a right word, a right label. And you also know that, no matter what you say to him now, it will always be wrong. 

“Jesus, I swear you—you fucking left!” You reach up to drag your hand through your hair, pulling your fringe to stand up on end. You feel like you’re sliding off a cliff face, reaching at stray outcrops to break your fall and only bruising your knuckles in the process, and the sensation makes you feel somehow a billion times worse than you already do. “You packed up your shit and left—”

“Not like you gave me much of a choice—”

“Fuck you, _you_ gave _me_ the choice. You threw some ass-backward ultimatum at my feet—”

“Ultimatum?” Karkat’s voice pitches up with incredulity in a way that makes something in the center of your chest burn. “Are you fucking serious?” 

“—and told me to choose between two of my best friends! Isn’t that what you said? You or Jade?”

“Did you not listen to a single fucking thing I told you then?” He looks for all the world like he’s expecting a response, and you’re halfway through cooking up some sentence that is probably going to make shit hit the fan fifty times harder than it already has—because, really, is there anything else you know how to do with him at this point?—but then he barrels on. “Did you legitimately just turn your brain off and mentally check out of this physical plane for as long as fucking possible so as not to hear the actual fucking thing I asked from you?”

“I don’t know, dude, has it ever occurred to you that maybe you’re not that good at being _direct,_ either?”

Because he isn’t. Because that’s all the two of you are sometimes—perfect fucking mirrors for one another. 

In front of you, Karkat’s expression screws up into one of almost comical anger. “I asked you to be honest!”

“Yeah, you said that,” you snap. “Would be super fucking helpful if I had any idea what you were talking about.”

He accuses, you deflect, the two of you rise to each other’s bait in near-perfect synchronization. It would almost be poetic were it not so goddamn awful to sit through.

“I asked you to be fucking honest about how you felt for me and how you felt for Jade.”

Even just hearing her name sends an uncomfortable wave of _something_ through you. You push it back as hard as you can, tipping your head at him, jaw setting of its own accord. “Okay, and?” You spread your hands. “I said that.”

“No, you didn’t,” he says, with the air of repeating the principle of basic math to a very small and clinically brain-dead toddler. “You fucking lied, Dave.”

You wish you were uncertain as to what he was talking about. You also wish he wasn’t right. The lack of fulfillment both these wishes has only set you off more, narrowing your eyes as you take a step closer to him. “You know, it’s not giving you honesty if you’re looking for a specific response, dude,” you say, voice as calm as you can manage. “That’s fucking cherry-picking.”

“I’m not cherry-picking, you stupid—I _know_ you, okay?” He reaches out like he wants to do something—touch you, slap you, jab your chest again—and you find yourself bracing for impact like there’s an eighteen-wheeler screaming down the wrong side of the freeway towards you. When he pulls his hand back, you feel it. “I know you, Dave. I know who you are and what you’re like and I am very fucking capable of telling when you’re lying through your fucking teeth to me.” 

It’s the smell of his shampoo filling the space around you—or maybe it’s the loose threads at the collar of his sweater, or freckles you can see on the ridge of his nose even in the dark—that gives you the strength to twist your smile into one of pure vindication and spit out, “Jealous much?”

His reaction is Karkat-typical levels of rage. If you were feeling particularly ballsy—which you are, if only by virtue of also feeling particularly self-destructive tonight—you might make a crack about how if he keeps pulling that face, it’s going to freeze that way. Unfortunately, he doesn’t give you space to even open your mouth. “Oh, go fuck yourself,” he says, something between a snap and a snarl this time, almost animalistic. “I told you, didn’t I? Didn’t I fucking say that? I _told_ you that I wouldn’t give a shit about what you said so long as it wasn’t a barefaced fucking lie. I—fuck you. I poured my heart out to you there and you couldn’t even extend me the fucking courtesy of telling me the goddamn truth.”

The word lie catches in the back of your head, rattles around your skull like a loose pinball. For a second, it is very, very hard to even think.

You aren’t lying.

You know yourself, and you know you aren’t lying. Not about what he’s implying. Not about the question he asked you back when you were living this moment for the first time. Not about—

You aren’t. You aren’t, and the fact that he even has the guts to insinuate that you are makes you see red.

The fact that maybe—just maybe—he isn’t coming from out of left field as much as you really fucking wish he was doesn’t make you see red even more, funnily enough. It makes you want to lie face-down on your bed with all the lights off, but that feels like a different story right now.

And isn’t it easier, being mad? Lashing out? Wasn’t that the first thing you ever learned from anyone?

“You don’t get to decide how I feel,” you say. Your voice is ice-cold.

“You don’t love her.”

He says it with such calm conviction you can barely breathe around the feeling building up in the center of your chest. It takes a concentrated effort to spit out the words “fuck you,” and saying it doesn’t even help.

You’re off the cliff face now, completely free falling. You wonder if he knows it, too. 

There’s something in the way his smile-turned-deformed-grimace doesn’t meet his eyes that tells you the answer to that might be _yes._ Still, he talks like there’s all the space in the word for this to get worse, lips curling around his words like he’s spitting teeth onto the pavement. “You don’t.”

And it’s the conviction, the fucking conviction, that kills you, runs you right through the stomach. You have to take another second to figure out how to breathe right, and when you do, you can hear air rushing in the back of your throat for a second. “No, seriously, fuck you,” you say. You’re almost nose-to-nose with him again. “You—this isn’t your fucking call to make, Karkat. I’m not one of your trashy-ass books or the plotline to fucking _Love, Actually._ Who I am and what I feel isn’t up for a fucking debate—are you even listening to yourself right now?”

But he just shakes his head, expression hardlining the gap between disappointment and pity. It makes your stomach turn. “You don’t,” he repeats, almost sounding sad. “And you want to know the worst part of this?”

You don’t. You really fucking do not.

“She thinks you do. She fucking—that girl _loves you_ , Dave.”

The back of your throat burns up. “Shut up.” 

“That girl worships the ground you walk all over. She looks at you like you hung the fucking stars in the sky for her, and there is not a single part of her that will ever willingly come to terms with the fact that every interaction her boyfriend has with her is built off a goddamn lie.”

“Shut _up.”_

“You’re lying to her.” Karkat tips his head to the side, sounding almost inquisitive. “You’re lying through your teeth to her.”

“Back the fuck off, Karkat.” Your own voice rings in your ears, coming out hollow, tinny, somehow separate from the rest of you. “I’m not kidding.”

“And boy oh fucking _boy,_ is it going to hurt when this shit comes out.” His expression is still calm, still gently curious, almost, but the smile he gives you is sharp-edged, biting, _mean._ “Because you know it will, right? She’s going to find out you don’t love her the way she loves you—”

_“Karkat—”_

“And it’s going to break her. You’re going to fucking break her.”

Deep in the center of your chest, the feeling explodes.

You don’t mean to lash out—not physically, at least—but there’s a sick sense of victory that the feeling of your hands connecting with Karkat’s chest as you shove him backward gives you that’s so dizzying you almost forget to care. Your vision goes red as the troll stumbles back, caught off guard enough to be displaced, but not enough to fully fall, and it’s through another explosion of pressure in the pit of your chest that you speak again while he fumbles for bearings. 

“Get out.” Your voice doesn’t even sound like yours. “Get the fuck out of my house.”

And there is a moment where, as he looks at you, _sees_ you, sees you in a way that only his stupid ass ever fucking could, that you think he is going to argue. 

Think might not be the operative word there. The letters take the shape of _hope_ in your mind, but with the way your hands are shaking at your side and you can barely breathe right still, that might not be right, either.

But then it doesn’t matter—if it ever did—because Karkat is stooping down to grab the bag at his feet, and then he is straightening up, throwing the strap over his shoulder at the same time as he steps back, making clear strides towards the door. 

He doesn’t break eye contact with you, though, and there isn’t a name for what you’re feeling because of it.

He pauses with one hand on the door, the other gripping the strap of his back. The look on his face is completely indecipherable. 

You wonder if things are always going to be like this from now on: him at one end of the room, you at the other, something intangible keeping things that way. You wonder if you could ever get used to it.

The answer is resounding: probably not. 

At the door, Karkat opens his mouth, then closes it with a snap. The noise is soft but definitive, and you can tell it’s the last you’re going to hear from him tonight. You will yourself to be less angry, less frustrated, less crushingly disappointed over it, and fall completely short. It only makes you feel worse. 

“Shut the door behind you,” you hear yourself say, voice raspy and flat. “Properly.”

He does, the noise echoing around the apartment. It feels like saying goodbye.


End file.
